Roller coaster

Today has been a real roller coaster. Extreme happiness, and then amazingly down. Tim has been just the same. Good news about my PhD – will not have to write the paper on grammaticalization, which I thought I had to in order to hand in. My colleague handed in today – very happy for him, but also depressed that it wasn’t me.

We spent quite a bit of the day finding a recipe and then shopping for tonight’s dinner. Made ‘pink ladies’ before dinner (mainly white rum and cranberry juice), with grilled pita bread, hummus, ‘aubergine mash’ (inspired by our trip to Israel) and olive tapenade. Then chilli marinated grilled chicken, with an amazing sauce with lime and sambal oelek.

Had to drive to Oxelösund for the shopping. I am really tired of the car now. Well, the car itself is quite all right (a Saab 9000?), especially after my parents fixed the ac. But there’s no radio and no CD-player, and as previous stated, I really prefer driving with music on. Driving down from Stockholm to the summer house, I had to sing to myself to get some music. However, I couldn’t really think of any songs that I knew. Aimed for some old style jazz/easy listening. Wanted to sing ‘Fly me to the moon’, but couldn’t even remember which song it was, only that it was something to do with ‘moon’. So started singing ‘Blue moon’ instead – problem being, I only knew those two words. Gave up. In the end, starting to sing ‘Happy birthday’ just because it was the only song I could think of.

The really bad news of the day is that my camera has died!!! Well, it was actually the lens, and not the camera house. To begin with, it was really hard to zoom in and out with the lens, but when removing it from the camera house, it refused to work completely, and there is now something loose inside it. Aaaah! I am so frustrated. Especially since Tim had just showed me a perfect butterfly bush, which we apparently have in the garden. Well, at least managed to take a few photos first… [And here, I tried to insert a few pretty pictures, but the amazingly slow internet connection we have in the cabin cannot take it.]

This has really been a great bug year. Not so many mosquitoes (or they have stopped liking me), but loads of flies and wasps. Luckily, my uncle has an illegal electric bug killer. It is shaped as a tennis racquet, which electrocutes the bugs. The voltage is apparently not allowed in this country, but it was bought in Thailand, so oh well. Tim loves ‘the toy’! And today I was grateful that he does, since we found the biggest flying thing I have ever seen. It was the size of my thumb, I swear. My mum argues that it was a hornet, but Tim claims it was just a weird form of fly. Whatever it was, I am more than happy to see it dead. Some parts of nature should never come inside…